Pluto

theorical interpretation: I did a lot of thinking over this album. In general, I wanted to understand more than what everyone did. For me Atlas wasn’t just something they choose randomnly, there has to be a meaning for that. So I tried to connect the dots and strings to come to a conclusion. And here’s what I found: “Like a final puzzle piece / It all makes perfect sense to me” Hades was both the name of the ancient Greek god of the underworld (Pluto) and the name of the shadowy place below the earth which was considered the final destination for the souls of the dead (we can compare it with the dwarf planet Pluto, the darkess, less visible, coldest and most distant planet on our solar system. “I’ve been worried all my life / A nervous wreck most of the time” Perhaps the most feared of the gods, he is described as ‘pitiless’, ‘loathsome’, and ‘monstrous’ Hades. “Until one day I had enough / Of this exercise of trust” according to greek mythology, hades once fell deeply in love with persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and wanted to marry her, but he got rejecter every time. therefore, tired of all the shots in the dark, he abducted her to live with him. “The heaviness that I hold in my heart belongs to gravity” if you consider that the surface gravity on Pluto is about 1/12th the surface gravity on Earth, we can assume here that as hades is the god of the underworld (on earth, obviously) his heart becomes heavier due to the difference of gravities.

Subjective meanings: This song is about someone/something (in case it is in fact about pluto the planet) extremely worried about everything. this person is scared to live his life at its best, so he hides behind his cold and dark mask so everyone fears him instead of hurting him. (“Still I’m pinned under the weight / Of what I believed would keep me safe / So show me where my armor ends / Show me where my skin begins”) He is looking for a sign, something or someone to remind him what’s like to feel again, to love and be loved, but he’s frequently haunted by his reputation of pitiless and loathsome. at some point he realizes things should remain the same, ‘cause maybe being not enough, always the forgotten, the invisible one, is easier and he finally understands his lack of sensibility that can never be fullfiled as much as he tries. as a form of mentally escaping from reality, he attributes all his faults to the place he is in but doesn’t belong to, as he concludes that the heaviness that he holds in his heart has been crushing him, and it belongs to gravity.

I listened to this song and immediately I thought about my own struggle with mental illness - and in particular, anxiety and OCD. The line that always strikes me is, "When I break pattern, I break ground / I rebuild when I break down" because, as someone with an anxiety disorder, I have to constantly be fighting my own brain. I have to constantly break the "pattern" I've developed to keep myself from panicking or else I fall back - so, "I break ground" when I manage to break out. I also "rebuild when I break down," because with mental illness, that's going to happen. I crash and burn and have to pick myself up again because that's just what I have to do.

The part that makes me thing of OCD in particular is the line that says, "Still I'm pinned under the weight / Of what I believed would keep me safe." Some people with OCD perform compulsions because we feel like something bad will happen if we don't - we are, quite literally, "pinned under the weight" of the things we believe will "keep us safe."

This is just an interpretation I've thought up, and it's a really personal one to me. I think you could also intemperate this song as talking about grief. The great thing about songs is that you can listen to them and take your own meaning.